YouTube's trending section shows it has a fake news problem, too

Hogg has been one of the many students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who have chosen to voice their opinions and concerns following the massacre that took place on their campus last week. And that spotlight has attracted hoards of trolls who have made claims ranging from Hogg being coached by his ex-FBI father to him being a paid "crisis actor." The latter was the claim being made in the comments of the YouTube trending video. The video itself was a CBS News clip from last year that reported on an altercation that took place between a friend of Hogg's and a Redondo beach lifeguard. Hogg was included in the news report.

Hogg, who was visiting Los Angeles during that time, published his own video about the event, but while the the CBS clip offers no evidence that Hogg is in fact a paid actor rather than a high school student, trolls have pushed it as evidence of such nonetheless. As Snopes writes, "Conspiracy theorists and trolls alike heavily implied that a months-old video (despite the facts that he readily identified himself with the same name, that people occasionally travel across the United States, and that his family moved to Florida from Los Angeles) is somehow 'proof' that he is a trained 'crisis actor,' a baseless rumor that is inevitably pushed after horrific mass shootings."

YouTube has removed the video and a company spokesperson told us, "This video should never have appeared in Trending. Because the video contained footage from an authoritative news source, our system misclassified it. As soon as we became aware of the video, we removed it from Trending and from YouTube for violating our policies. We are working to improve our systems moving forward."

Google, which owns YouTube, has come under fire for spreading fake news in the past. Following the 2016 US presidential election, Google search surfaced a WordPress site rife with inaccuracies about the final election numbers and after the Las Vegas shooting last October, it promoted a 4chan thread spreading misinformation about the massacre. Last year, Google took steps to prevent its search from surfacing fake news, which included adding Fact Check tags, promoting more authoritative sources and partnering with the International Fact-Checking Network. It also began to show more information on publishers, use Trust Indicators and stopped showing news from sources that do not provide their country of origin. Last month, it also announced that it would start doing more to prevent fake news from seeping into its snippets.

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